Google is poised to become the dominant force in British advertising. In 2008, if ITV cannot sort itself out, the internet search engine could be the biggest recipient of advertising pounds in the country.

Google is on track to make more than £800 million this year — last year the figure was £460 million, implying a near-doubling of turnover — which tells you all you need to know about why tabloid and regional newspapers are short of a bob or two.

Having taken the money, Google’s cultural contribution is virtually nil. You can find about 10.4 million results for, say, Pamela Anderson in 0.06sec, which saves time in a busy day for an extra sip of latte. It is not quite that trivial, but Google is essentially a useful research tool, and Google Earth does give you nice views of the planet.

Elsewhere, advertising has helped to produce a bit more. On Channel 4 this Sunday you can watch Roman excavations on Time Team and, if you stay up until Monday, FIVB Beach Volleyball, a virtuous mix of highbrow and trash TV that £800 million of advertisers’ money made possible this year.

Without advertising there would be fewer newspapers, magazines and, all in all, less fun. Now that the internet allows advertising to be decoupled from editorial content or programming, the worry is that only a reinvented version of Loot can survive.

Of course, this goes over the top. Andy Duncan, the Channel 4 boss who sounded the alarm this week, wants to create a sense of crisis while the BBC licence fee is in the balance and his company’s finances are being reviewed by Ofcom. At present Google and broadcasters are not competing for the same pool of cash. Instead, Google takes money from recipients of classified advertising — and who is going to miss Exchange & Mart or a freesheet with two pages of council news?

That does not mean that Google is no threat. Buying YouTube marks a change in strategy. Now Google wants to be a portal, keeping viewers on its website, broadcasting all sorts of clips, and maybe one day — why not? — entire television shows. How will Google make money from the massive traffic that YouTube generates? The moment that it starts selling video spots it is in competition with broadcast advertising. And given Google’s rapid rise so far, the search engine as broadcaster could make a lot of money fast.

Should newspapers fear, too? Maybe. Google News does not sell advertising, although a Belgian court — wrongly — thought that it did. It told the search company that it was infringing the copyright of local newspapers by linking to their stories. That can change, though, because Google introduces a high proportion of traffic to some papers. At some point print advertisers might realise that a larger, pooled audience lies elsewhere.

Google has the potential to make a lot of powerful enemies. It is not wise to alienate broadcasters and newspapers at the same time. That may explain why, immediately after the purchase of YouTube, Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, was quick to catch up with News Corporation, the parent company of The Times and the MySpace website. It will take more than warm words. Google can make more money winning advertising revenue from Channel 4 and the Daily Mail, but it will be smarter if it can find a way of working in partnership with traditional media.

There are hints that its thinking is moving that way, and so Mr Duncan should stop trying to get a bit of indirect help from the BBC licence fee and instead work out how to strike a revenue share deal with the search engine or one of its competitors. That could be a better way to protect future episodes of Dispatches.

• Creation Records, home to Oasis and Primal Scream, was deemed to be one of the Cool Britannia success stories of the 1990s, with Alan McGee, its supremo, celebrated by Labour politicians. Times change, though, and Creation, which always operated from hand to mouth, got absorbed by Sony BMG, and McGee moved on.

  While Universal dominates and EMI and Warner joust, Sony BMG struggles. Oasis are out of contract, and at the Q Music Awards this week Noel Gallagher said that Sony was going down the pan. “All they’ve got left is our catalogue,” he said. “You’d think they’d be out there trying to find raw talent.” That is doubtless an exaggeration, but it strikes a chord, given Sony BMG’s loss of market share. It is all too easy to squander a creative inheritance.

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